STILL NO RED BALLOONS, at least not from my frog’s-eye view of the sea. I check my watch and realize I’ve been at it for more than forty-five minutes. Will I finish in time if I can’t find the boat? That’s one of the challenges of open-water swimming: without markers, you can’t read distance. The field of blue seems to stretch on forever. And that’s just across. Down is another problem. It’s too deep to see the bottom, maybe three hundred feet beneath me, and there are no lane lines to keep me straight. No walls to push off. Not to mention the fact that I am sharing someone else’s territory, someone who might not be terribly friendly. Someone, or something, that now shows up unexpectedly.
“Yuck!” The fingers of my left hand strike Jell-O—a slimy mass that feels like dessert. I retract my arm like a bullet and peer into the brine: it’s a jellyfish, a transparent, undulating disk some four inches in diameter that, I am relieved to discover, seems equally repelled by me. It scoots away benignly. We’ve all been obsessing about jellyfish, daily discussing the odds of long, poisonous stingers plaguing our route. The boats, we’re assured, carry plenty of vinegar to treat the afflicted. Small consolation. As it turns out, we’re lucky—no purple nasties this day, just these colorless little critters, who intermittently become my companions for the crossing. Half a dozen times my eyes fasten on a small cluster—a class, not a school, of jellies, shimmering in shafts of sunlight. One grander specimen, at least ten inches across, whirls around like a flying saucer. It’s dreamy and makes me smile. Then I refocus.
This is not Leander’s route. For one thing, he swam at night, while we splash across in splendid sun. For another, he, mythologically, shot straight from his home in the ancient Asian city of Abydos to the tower where Hero lived in European Sestos, a distance that used to measure less than a mile, according to the first-century geographer Strabo. Since both cities are long gone, and the coastline has substantially eroded, our journey follows a slightly different path, governed less by myth than by nature.
“There are two sets of currents,” Ahmet told us at the briefing, projecting a giant diagram with unambiguous arrows. “The warm water from the Mediterranean flows north and is pushed under by the cold water from the Black Sea flowing south.” The result: a narrow pair of upward flowing forces along each coast flanking a broader and much faster downward force in the middle. It is too strong to permit a simple, point-to-point crossing, which would only be about a mile. Instead, we are routed along a sweeping arc from the town of Eceabat, on the European side, slightly northeast to compensate for the currents, then southeast along the shore to the finish line at Canakkale, the quiet Asian seaport where we are staying. Canakkale’s main tourist attraction is the gigantic wooden horse used in the Brad Pitt movie Troy, a campy souvenir of an artifact that likely never existed from a film that was not shot here. This is no Hollywood-on-the-Hellespont, simply where we will end up if we follow the squiggly path.
Four times longer than the straight shot across, it is the only smart choice. “If you go in a straight line, very few will complete the course,” Ahmet cautions over and over again. “You can be dragged out of the strait. You can easily underestimate the current. And if you’re in it, and find yourself south of the finish point, it is almost impossible to swim back. Don’t try. Accept the help of the boats.” Just in case we don’t catch his drift, he concludes ominously, “You must swim this course. If not, you will wind u. . . . [pause for dramatic effect. . . . somewhere else.” Some of the audience giggle. I busily memorize the diagram.
I have been obsessed by maps since I signed up for this event, repeatedly pulling up the location on Google Earth and tracing my finger across these waters. It seemed to make sense sitting at home in New York; the idea of crossing open water felt both exotic and sensible. A destination swim. Now that I’m in it, it’s a lot bigger than my fingertip. But I like the sense of place, the knowledge that I’m not bouncing back and forth between walls, just going forth to another continent. As Simon Murie of SwimTrek has told me, “It’s about the idea of the journey. When you’ve done it, you can see where you came from. That’s the great thing about open-water swimming: you finish somewhere different. In a pool, you finish where you started.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with swimming pools. In the ongoing debate over where best to swim—the untamed blue waters that define our planet or the boxed-in beauty of pools—I’m an equal-opportunity addict. And while I trained for the Hellespont mostly by swimming long distances in the bay and the ocean off the eastern end of New York’s Long Island, my final postevent workouts were in the warm crystal waters of the peaceful pool at the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul, a blue-tiled oasis snuggled so close to the Bosporus, I imagined myself swimming across that fabled waterway, too.
Pools glisten in the sun; they illuminate a dreary yard; they play with lines and light, as the wavy reflections of sun in water animate the straight walls. Shadows and shimmering patterns make endless new designs, always in motion, as the artist David Hockney brilliantly captured in swimming-pool paintings and collages that have redefined the color blue. Pools are pure, a simple shape that traps nature’s force for our benefit. We think differently about water when it’s made accessible. It’s a surprise, a safe haven in the most improbable places. One proposal for the redevelopment of New York’s abandoned High Line railway imagined the entire track as a swimming pool, a mile-long ribbon of blue winding above the city. One very long lap. The author of a history of swimming pools doctored a photo to add a diving board to the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Suddenly it graduates from decoration to invitation: you want to plunge in. (Don’t: It’s too shallow. Also illegal.)
At a health club in Manhattan’s East Side, I swam in a pool beneath a skylight so vast, I could count the buildings and, in my mind’s eye, swim down, then up Second Avenue. Cars can’t even do that. In Deer Valley, Utah, I gathered up my granddaughters and took a dip amid the steam of the 100-degree pool at the Stein Erikson Lodge, a blissful way to repair the muscle damage of a day on the trails. Watching skiers slide by was otherworldly; as eleven-year-old Sammy pointed out, “Lynn, your hair is frozen!”
Seeing pools from an airplane makes me want to parachute in. They are modern oases, turquoise rectangles in the urban desert. Lawmakers find them even more valuable. In 2010, when Greece first awoke to its dire financial situation, satellite photos of swimming pools in the suburbs helped identify scofflaws who were not paying taxes on them.
Pools were an ancient pleasure as well. Public baths, sometimes used for swimming, dotted the Roman Empire, vital centers of social discourse before they devolved into playgrounds of debauchery. In Rome, Pliny the Younger had a heated pool from which he could see the sea. Seneca the Younger lived up to his Stoic principles by bathing only in cold water and criticizing his colleagues for disparaging anything but a pool lined with fancy marble. But the biggest pool empire of that world was built by the erratic first-century BCE dictator, Herod the Great, whose indoor and outdoor tanks can be seen in Israel from the top of Masada to the ramparts of old Jerusalem. The archeological evidence of this master builder’s monuments are dazzling. Herod built a 250-meter pool at his palace in Jericho, now in Jordan, which might have been used for sailing. Also for a drowning. The maniacal king was so identified with the structures, in the 1970s Broadway hit Jesus Christ, Superstar, the character of Herod challenges Jesus to “walk across my swimming pool,” an irreverent allusion that is at least rooted in historic real estate.
Like swimming itself, the pool as a popular addition to courtyard or backyard disappeared from Western history after the fall of Rome. In the eighteenth century, the first floating tanks drifted on barges down the River Seine. The Germans and Austrians quickly built their own. In Germany, King Ludwig II, who would ultimately be known by the adjective “mad,” included a pool in his fairy-tale Neuschwanstein Castle. Meanwhile, they started digging in England, where by the 1850s enough pools existed to feed the growing passion for the sport. In the United States, swimming baths came to the big cities, and the first public swimming pool may have been the one opened in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1897—a grand indoor tank that paid homage to Leander, among others, on its tiled walls.
In California, William Randolph Hearst set a new standard with his Roman-style pools (designed by architect Julia Morgan) at San Simeon, a modern palace. By the 1930s, swimming pools had moved from the private estates of Vanderbilts and Morgans on the East Coast to the mansions of movie stars on the West. They were a symbol of luxury, the exclusive province of royalty and the rich. “Hollywood? Oh, what a life!,” proclaimed actor Dick Powell in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel. “Falling in and out of swimming pools.”
Liberace and Frank Sinatra swam in pools shaped like pianos; Jayne Mansfield, a heart. Joan Fontaine had a pool with an island in the middle; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks could fit a canoe in theirs.
Pools became freeform with the availability of the more moldable gunnite, leading to specimens shaped like, of all things, kidneys. A Florida dentist had a pool that looked like a molar; a seafood wholesaler, a blue crab. Angles returned with lap pools, an invention of the 1970s. And while California remained the swimming-pool capital of the country, the suburbanization of America in the late 1950s suddenly made pools affordable for more mainstream citizens. In 1948, there were 2,500 residential swimming pools in the United States; in 1957, 57,000. It was just the beginning.
Today the more than 10 million Americans with private pools are using them for far more than just swimming. “I think the biggest trend is that people these days want more than a pool,” says Dan Johnson, a Florida builder who operates out of Sarasota. “When I got into the business, if you gave them a fifteen-by-thirty kidney-shaped pool, they were thrilled. Today, almost no pool goes in without a water feature. They want to see the water move; they want to hear it move; they want it to dance, to turn colors at night.” One of his most popular features, he says, is the rain curtain: “A laminar jet creates a stream so perfect, it looks like a neon tube. And I can actually tune the sound.” Johnson adds that people originally just wanted to get wet, to splash around, “happy as a lark. Now, getting wet isn’t enough.”
I ask if people actually swim in their pools these days. “The vast majority don’t!” Johnson replies, astonished. “I’d guess less than 20 percent. I’d bet my salary on it.” So what do they do there? “We build a lot of benches in pools, like living rooms,” he explains. “Also tables, against the side wall, and on the other side, bar stools. They sit down and have cocktails, eat something, then get out. Or they put the outdoor TV on the lanai, and if it’s football season, guys are there with all their buddies. Pools have become true entertainment centers.”
Pool, bar, state-of-the-art kitchen, fireplace, rope swings, and waterfalls in Asheville, N.C. “It has changed the way our family spends time together,” say the owners, the parents of four children. 
Dick Covert, whose Richmond, Virginia–based Masters Pools Guild connects high-end pool builders around the world, says the trend began after 9/11, “when a lot of people started saying, ‘Travel is not safe; it’s hectic; it’s inconvenient. We’re going to create our own environment in our house.’” So they turned their backyards into mini-resorts, with outdoor kitchens and waterfalls and other amenities. “Outdoor living has become a way of life,” he says, “and the pool area has become another room in their home.” He describes a home in Oklahoma City where the pool area contains “a lazy river—like at a resort, where you can float in an inner tube, several hundred yards long. There’s a lot of land in Oklahoma!” And he says most outdoor kitchens contain “a Viking-type setup to cook, grill, or make the meal completely outdoors. There’s also generally a lounge area, with the TV. It’s really where they live.”
His customers, says Covert, also swim. “They want twenty-five meters for laps. And one of our vendors does a really good business in in-pool bicycles and treadmills.” He’s also seen his share of odd designs, especially in Nashville. “I saw a pool shaped like a record with an island in the middle. And a piano. And one like a Star Trek deal.” Another trend, he says, is the natural pool—building something that looks as if it belongs there. “We see a lot where you can walk down what we call ‘zero entry,’ or beach entry,” he explains. “It’s just like going in from the beach. And we have one in Illinois that looked like a winter scene with snow, a gorgeous pond in the winter—but not frozen, because they kept it heated.” Covert believes that pools are an escape. “People see them as a total change from the hectic world we live in. When you go into your backyard and all of a sudden you’re in a quiet place with running water, you hear the fountain—well, you just begin to relax. After you’re tied in knots all day long, working, on the telephone, on the computer, a pool has a calming effect on people.” A former lifeguard who still enjoys the water himself, Dick Covert prefers the pool to the ocean. “I don’t like the salt; I don’t like the creatures. In the ocean you have to struggle. In a pool I can just float!”
On the other hand, swimming pools are a round trip to nowhere, over and over again. The narrator of a novel about a racer says, “Swimming back through your own wake you always feared that you’d crash into yourself coming the other way. They should have built pools that expanded or contracted to the required length, or huge circular ones in which you’d spiral round until you reached the center.”
“I don’t like pools,” SwimTrek’s Simon Murie admits. “In an indoor pool, every day is the same. It’s like McDonald’s—the same meal wherever you are. But go to a local café, and every meal will be different. That’s the beauty of open-water swimming: each day is different.”
Annette Kellerman was more blunt. “Swimming under a roof to me is like big game hunting in a zoo. All legitimate fascination goes.”
Open-water swimming is not for the faint of heart or the easily chilled. One of the founders of the wild swimming movement in Britain, where hardy souls seek the least hospitable swimming holes, advises, “You must get in with purpose. Don’t just stand there dipping your toe and wondering if it’s warm enough, because if you are in Britain chances are it won’t be.”
Especially if you’re dipping that toe into the English Channel. The water measured a nippy 61 degrees when Gertrude Ederle struck out in 1926. And that was just the temperature at the surface, in August, when the icy waters heated up. It is so volatile, you can see the swirling currents; so unpredictable, you can start in a lake and soon be battered by crushing swells; so demonic, the turn of the tide can keep you from your goal, as Ederle discovered just offshore of Kent. “I felt as if the sea were pulling me right away from England,” she said later.
So what’s the draw? Why do people still grease themselves up, gather a GPS-directed crew, dodge oil tankers, and agree to be fed from cups dangled at the end of a stick (no touching the boat or a human, or you’re disqualified)? Why has the goal line moved from just crossing the perilous sleeve, as the French call it, to crossing it three times in a row, for which the record is now twenty-eight hours, twenty-one minutes, just eight hours longer than it took Matthew Webb to make it one way? The answer is not, as mountaineer George Mallory said of climbing Mount Everest, “Because it’s there.” “You don’t swim the Channel because it’s there: you swim it because you are,” writes Kathy Watson in her book about the first crossing. “Channel swimming is about oneself, and crossing the Channel is never less than a rite of passage in the swimmer’s life.” A California physicist who swam it in 1988 elaborated. “The sea is not susceptible to human vanity,” observed David Clark. “When I got out of the ocean, stood on the shoreline in France and looked back across the Channel, it did not look defeated to me. What we conquer are our own limitations.”
That’s also why Diana Nyad chose the treacherous course from Havana to Key West, 103 miles of open water that could take sixty hours to cross. “I wasn’t searching for some grand accomplishment to do,” she said. “I was just thinking, how to live my everyday life so I don’t have any regrets at the end?” At sixty-one she was swimming for anyone who has ever agonized that growing older means saying good-bye to dreams. Months before the event, I meet her in Manhattan to find out about her mindset and her training. At 8 AM she’s already done two and a half hours of fifty-yard laps at a steady sixty strokes per minute. That’s both arms every second, nonstop. Watching her swim is unnerving. When we go across the street for breakfast, she is ravenous. Oatmeal, yogurt, berries, bananas, eggs, bacon. Watching her eat is encouraging. “I don’t feel old,” she tells me. “Yeah, I’m a bit slower than I was, burlier. But I’m pretty darn strong. Used to be like a racehorse—now I’m more like a Clydesdale.” One with more than a little horse sense about the mystical qualities of long-distance swimming.
“People save up their whole lives to go to Nepal to sit in an ashram,” she says. “They just want to go where I’m going—to get out of their daily lives and explore the universe of their mind.”
In the summer of 2011 she made her fourth attempt at what became a much-publicized swim. Partway across, two deadly jellyfish—the Portuguese man-of-war—whipped their long, stringy tentacles, injecting lethal toxins into her body. “It was as if a science fiction whisk flew across my body in less than 1/1000th of a second,” Nyad later wrote. “The pain is excruciating. Intolerable. As if you have been held down in boiling oil. I yelled out FIRE, FIRE, I’M ON FIRE!!” As the paralysis from the venom spread, she had trouble breathing; her life was in danger. She finally agreed to quit, her dream crushed.
“We plan for one scenario, one relationshi. . . . and a very different animal presents itself,” she concluded, after her body healed. “And we survive.”
That calm acceptance of the inevitable unites many of the open-water swimmers I meet, a lesson that goes beyond any body of water.
“You don’t conquer Mother Nature,” explains my pool pal Alan Morrison, a robust lawyer with enviable shoulder muscles whose long-distance swims include the Santa Barbara Channel, Boston Harbor, and Tampa Bay. “I don’t swim marathons to win. It’s to have a long visit and hope that Mother Nature lets me through.” Sometimes she doesn’t. “My first long swim was around Key West in 2006,” he recalls. “A squall came up, and the lightning started. That crackly kind of lightning. Then the safety boat came by, and the guy said, ‘We strongly urge you to get in the boat.’ I was on board before he finished the sentence.”
Alan is an attorney specializing in biotechnology and pharmaceutical law, which may help explain his affinity for water. “Swimming is a fabulous sport for anything quantitative,” he explains over breakfast one morning after a workout, “because you’re always counting. In the pool it’s always a math exercise; it’s pattern recognition, formation.” During the marathon, it’s just plain grit. “There are parts that are pure hell,” he answers, when I ask about the fourteen-hour, twenty-four-mile Tampa Bay swim he has just completed. “In the middle you’re reevaluating everything. You consider canceling the other two you’ve already signed up for. You start getting melancholy. You really start wishing you had died as a child.” I’m not sure he’s joking. “Then,” he recalls, “I thought, ‘If I represented myself as an attorney, what would it take to quit? What excuse would be compelling enough?’ Then, ‘how would I feel when I woke up the next morning?’ That stopped me. I just kept telling myself, ‘It’s kind of like your Bar Mitzvah. You can’t quit! Half the planet’s watching on the Internet.’” Which is where he’s met many of them. He took up swimming as an adult, he says, and “it’s changed my life. Of all the people I know on Facebook, almost all wear swim caps.”
That’s another common refrain among swimmers today: the loneliness of the long-distance swimmer has been supplanted by the digital and daily support of colleagues, as group swims and more social open-water challenges have become more available. You still can’t chat when your head is underwater, and it’s unlikely that the boss will organize a foursome for a swim outing, but like the transformation of the backyard pool to an outdoor living room, swimming is emphasizing the communal as much as the competitive. There are open-water events from South Africa to Sweden; in the United States, from Chesapeake Bay to Alcatraz Island. Open water became an Olympic event in 2008 in Beijing. In 2012 it will be a ten-kilometer (six-mile) race in London’s Serpentine, a lake in the middle of Hyde Park with a storied racing past, including Christmas Day plunges into its iced-over waters, often requiring a hatchet.
In New York, more than 2,100 swimmers participated in fourteen major events run by NYC Swim last summer, from a car-free crossing under the Brooklyn Bridge to the circumlocution of the Statue of Liberty to the killer 17.5-mile marathon called the Ederle Swim, after Gertrude, who first freestyled from lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1925. The signature swim is the 28.5-mile trip around Manhattan Island, inspired by Diana Nyad’s record-breaking excursion in 1975. “I breathed to the left, and swimming counterclockwise I saw New York all day,” she tells me long after the fact. “And people took off work or came down for a few hours and cheered me on. I looked down the expanse of the Hudson and went under the George Washington Bridge and could see the Statue of Liberty all the way down. It was magnificent.” That special view of the world’s most special city was also described by Dave Tanner, now coaching high school swimmers in Indiana. “I swam along the East River,” he tells me. “I saw the United Nations. I passed taxis—I was going faster than they were. Then I headed down the Hudson. It took seven and a half hours. My shoulders were so sore, I couldn’t shift the gears driving home. My friend shifted from the passenger seat!”
Morty Berger, a banker and swimmer, started NYC Swim to revive an activity that once permeated the Big Apple. “This is a second dance for the sport,” he tells me, citing the glory years when match races and endurance swims by Ederle and a pack of predecessors made regular runs in the city’s waterways. He says the momentum has been building, thanks to the quadrennial buzz about the Olympics, the aging of a population that cannot do marathons and triathlons forever, and the more-than-admirable cleanup of the city’s waters. “It’s a perfect storm now, because there’s a little edge of danger as well,” Berger says. “You know, darker water, Jaws is gonna get you.”
He’s only partly kidding. “There’s a kind of magic when you’re out there, in your zone,” Berger goes on. “It allows you to have your own private thrill.” Which is as poetic as he gets. I ask what makes swimming special. “Some say it’s the womb, but I don’t remember that and don’t wish to revisit it even with a psychiatrist.”
Berger’s biggest booster and volunteer public ambassador doesn’t need any outside help. “Swimming is my drug, my therapy, my church,” says Capri Djatiasmoro, sixty, a bubbly self-described mermaid whose enthusiasm has ushered many into New York’s waters. Almost any weekend, year-round, you can find her at the beach—in a black Speedo with a snappy camera tucked into the bodice. “My cleavage cam,” she explains, sneaking in a quick shot that will later be posted online. Capri works in advertising, coordinating outdoor national campaigns for major corporations. But her heart remains in the water. “I wish I could swim all the time,” she says to me one evening over dinner. “I always complain at the office, ‘I’m missing a really great beach day. And if you really appreciate me, I want a waterproof laptop that I could take to the beach!’” A former triathlete with the musculature to match, she has completed almost every event sponsored by NYC Swim and gets depressed if she goes more than a week out of the water. “It’s very calming,” she tells me. “As soon as I get into the water, all the mental garbage, all the internal chatter”—moving her fingers around her head like a tightly wound spring—“all that stuff goes away. Especially with long-distance swims. I check my form; then I go wandering around the universe.”
Close Encounters of the Aquatic Kind
Five hours into his marathon swim across Tampa Bay, Alan Morrison felt fish nibbling at his thighs. “Actually, they were pressing their bodies against me and vibrating,” he recalls. “I didn’t know if they were trying to mate with me and this was foreplay.” They continued to vibrate as they moved down his legs. After five or ten seconds, they’d go away, then return after five or ten minutes. There were at least ten encounters. The first time he stopped abruptly and told the woman kayaking alongside, ‘Something is crawling down my leg.’ She smiled. I asked if I had anything to worry about. She said no. So I swam on.”
As a child, Capri Djatiasmoro often swam alone in the Caribbean waters off Mexico. Calmly and soberly, she tells me, “Once I ran into this five-foot barracuda. We both scared the shit out of each other! I know that he freaked out because his colors changed, from cool silver to blotchy gray. So mentally I was thinking, and talking to the barracuda, and I said, ‘Listen, I understand this is your territory, but I’m just passing through. I mean you no harm.’ So then he calmed down, and he said, ‘OK, but you scared me!’ I said, ‘You know, you scared me! But just let me pass, ‘cause I’m just passing through.’ And that was that.” I ask if the dialogue was all in her head. “Well, I think we were communicating,” she replies. And then she starts to tell me about the time she was scuba diving and heard a noise like a rattlesnake, then saw lobster claws on a ledge. “And lobsters are very curious. So I waved, and he felt the wave and came out, and calmed down. Fish are just like people,” she explains. “They have personalities.”
The camaraderie among swimmers, particularly in open water, is contagious. My Hellespont swim was preceded by a round of parties and meetings that produced instant friendships and mutual support. And that’s just one of the events organized by SwimTrek, which bills itself as “the world’s leading swimming holiday operator.” (There are at least half a dozen others I found around the world.) In 2003, when it began, they took just under 100 swimmers to three spots. In 2011, they took more than 2,000 people to twenty-six locations, including Greece, Croatia, and Egypt. That partly reflects “more awareness of the great outdoors,” says founder Simon Murie. “Thirty years ago, inland waterways and lakes were considered trash areas, where you put your pollution. Now they’re cleaner than they’ve ever been, and people realize that there’s more to do than swim in a pool.”
No one has explored the human potential of the oceans better than Lynne Cox, the gifted swimmer and eloquent writer who has helped change the face of swimming in the wild. Her generosity to other swimmers is legendary; her passion for the earth’s waters, unbounded. “I’ll open up an atlas and see all the blue places,” she explains, “but each is different—in color, taste, buoyancy. Each is a world in itself.” With two record English Channel crossings (the first before she was old enough to drive) and a string of other global successes, she has reclaimed the oceans as avenues for swimmers. “You are lifted by the waves,” she tells me. “Everything is always changing, even the light on the water. The different kinds of froth. And at night, the phosphorous sparks fly.” What she really appreciates is “knowing you’re part of something else.”
Lynne is best known for her ice-water swims, bone-piercing immersions, which she partly attributes to the wet suit she’s grown on her body. “If I were a tall, lean guy, I wouldn’t get far in the water,” she says matter-of-factly. “No body fat.” Her internal temperature is 1 degree cooler than average, and yes, that makes a difference. The lower baseline means she doesn’t have to work as hard to keep it warm. She can also voluntarily close down her peripheral blood flow “so it migrates to my core.” She sweats in a 76-degree pool. But in the unimaginably frigid waters where she’s swum—the Bering Sea, the Antarctic, Alaska’s Glacier Bay—she does indeed feel the cold. She just doesn’t focus on it. “You don’t want to give energy to it,” she says, another life lesson from the blue.
Great advice, but not the sort of thing I’d try at home. I’ve always like my water, well, warm. Not hot. Okay, cool. But not cold. That is to say, I am happiest when there is no shock to the system, which means little discernable difference between the warmth of the air and that of the liquid I’m entering. Except for certain killer scorching days, I like to slide into a friendly, womb-like world. It is safe. It is comforting. I am, however, getting more flexible as a result of my Hellespont training. I’ve discovered that colder (translation: very slightly cooler) water is better for faster swims and longer workouts. A quick chill can be energizing. But I know my limits.
One brisk Sunday morning in February, I head out to see the Coney Island Polar Bears—not a group of Arctic animals, but a collection of sturdy souls who choose to take a dip when the temperature takes a dive. Polar Bear clubs exist all over the country, many daring only on New Year’s Day to bathe in frigid water, usually to raise money for charity. The Coney Island Polar Bear Club calls itself the oldest in the United States, and they swim in the Atlantic Ocean every single Sunday from November through April. After clomping through a field of snow to get to the bleak wintry beach, I find a dozen or so Bears—including retirees, freelancers, a postal worker, and a pastry chef—casually milling about in the 46-degree sunshine. It is just after noon, and I am wearing jeans, a turtleneck, a parka, boots, gloves, and a scarf tied snugly around my neck. They are all dressed or, rather, undressed, in bikinis or boxers over both beer bellies and trim bodies. No one is shivering. 
“You can’t be more democratic than in a bathing suit,” says one member, laughing. “Every day is a beach day,” explains another, a tall, thin fellow who came on doctor’s orders twenty-one years ago to get some exercise in winter. “The first time it felt like pins and needles, but then it clicked.” Louis Padilla, sixty-nine, used to operate an elevator in Manhattan’s garment center. He also used to need crutches because “my knees were gone—I couldn’t walk straight.” After twenty-seven years of swimming here, “it all disappeared. No pain. I love it. It’s cold, but I don’t feel it so much.” The health thing comes up a lot with the Polar Bears, because their founder, back in 1903, advocated physical fitness long before it was popular. Cold water was part of the mix. And remains the lure. “It’s crazy and fun and cheaper than therapy,” adds Bob Croce, fifty-one, who did his first cold-water dunk on a dare. “It’s about those endorphins.” I ask how he warms up after the swim. “At the end? I just run to the car,” he says, laughing.
Just after 1 PM, club president Dennis Thomas, fifty-five, leads the Bears through the snow and down to the beach. I join the march with a bald sushi chef who remembers the time he swam in Lake George, “when I had hair, and when I came up from the water all my hair was frozen”; with Mike Spataro, a strapping ex-marine who drives here weekly from his home in New Jersey. “It takes me one hour and two bridges,” he says proudly. “And it’s expensive, too.” Mike starts to laugh as he recalls the day they swam through a blinding blizzard, a moment captured in a hilarious video that I later see online, and another day when the windchill factor brought the temperature down to about 10 degrees. “The sand was like razors; we backed into the
water.” Today he’s barefoot.
Then Dennis Thomas launches into the weekly ritual: the swimmers form a big circle, where he leads them in a chant—today it’s about the Super Bowl—accompanied by blood-warming jumping jacks. That sends them into the water, just above freezing, where they bravely form another circle, hooting loudly, then swim off at will. One woman in a green cap takes off as if it’s summer. A slender young woman wearing a fake fur hat and a tiger print bikini retreats to the beach almost immediately, the bright pink skin two inches above her studded navel marking how far she stepped in. “That’s all I can take,” says Adrienne Adams, a private caterer, shivering. So why wear a bikini? “The suit wouldn’t have made a difference.” As one of the regulars, she does it, I assume, from a deep if loony desire to embrace the chill. I am dead wrong. “I hate winter,” she tells me, her pink skin now turning blue. “This is my surrender. This is just my way to deal with it.”
In all, they swim about twelve minutes. Capri Djatiasmoro is here, casually shaking off the winter water. “This just feels great—you should try it!” she insists. “Within two minutes, you release a chemical cocktail—dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. That’s the Polar Bear high.” From my totally dry and warm spot on the beach, I ask how cold it felt. “You know when you’re at a party, and you put your arm into the bucket of ice to get the last beer? That’s how cold it is. On your whole body. It’s a shock, but so in the moment. Nothing else exists. You are right there dealing with it. Right there.” She is smiling—they all are—and it actually (am I crazy?) looks like fun. I am almost tempted to try it. Almost.
Red Tide
The poster reads, in part, “Closely follow the great leader Chairman Mao and forge ahead courageously amid great storms and waves.”
The photo looked fake: one little head bobbing among 5,000 in a mass swimathon across China’s Yangtze River in July 1966. But Mao Zedong was indeed there, a stroke of political theater to dispel rumors that the enigmatic chairman, seventy-two, was ill and unfit to lead. A lifelong swimmer (“Do you swim? Water is a good thing”), he showed up in Wuhan unannounced and executed his peculiar “lounge-chair style”—on his back, arms and legs adrift—to float some nine miles downstream for more than an hour. The current was as favorable as the reception. He even paused to teach the backstroke to a young girl. The crowd, reported the state-run media, erupted into “spasms of cheers.” The outside world read the aquatic tea leaf as a sign that Chairman Mao was prepared to resume control of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Chinese citizens saw it as an invitation to follow the Great Leader through the changing tides of power. “There was old Mao waving his hand,” said one, recalling the picture of him wrapped in his bathrobe. “He may as well have been standing on the water.”
As Dennis Thomas heads back through the snow, barefoot, I ask whether he swims there in the summer as well. “Nope,” he says. “Too crowded.”
I’m guessing a pool wouldn’t suit him either.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий